Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (1932)

o me they are as beautiful as anything I know, " Georgia O'Keeffe said of the sun-bleached bones and skulls she found in the desert. " To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around…. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty " (1). The ragged mountain terrain with its fossilized formations, saturated color, and naked wilderness held inexhaustible fascination for O'Keeffe and was a source of inspiration for most of her artistic career. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the second of seven children, Georgia O'Keeffe was a pioneering and charismatic woman. Training to be an art teacher, she attended the Teachers College. During her teaching years in Texas and later as an artist in New York City, O'Keeffe showed herself to be a complex and contradictory person with exceptional observation skills. She could fathom and depict in her work the immensity of creation in a homespun style reminiscent of what Willa Cather once called " that irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand " (2). Over the years, O'Keeffe became an " antiauthoritarian revolutionary, " the notoriety of her lifestyle sometimes overcoming the originality of her work. She shunned European traditions and influence and resisted all manner of paternalism. Like Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich, she never signed her paintings, and like Jackson Pollock, she found Native American art as inspiring as Renaissance art (3). Eventually, she abandoned the New York City art scene that founded her reputation and moved west to New Mexico for a more authentic artistic experience. There, in a landscape unencumbered by undue neighbor-liness and excessive vegetation, she created work that was timeless, universal, and impersonal. From the grandeur and vastness of the western landscape, O'Keeffe extracted a compressed, concise, and reductive style. Breaking away from the constraints of scale, she painted telescopic images that favored the distant and the immediate. She made the small seem large and the large small as she focused on a single isolated object: a mountain, a stone, a flower, a bone. Educated in oriental scroll painting and influenced by the work of Wassily Kandinsky, she understood that emptiness could signify fullness, and she applied that principle in panoramic landscape paintings, as well as in …